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Diane Greene makes Americas 50

CS alumnus Diane Greene (M.S. '88), the CEO of Google Cloud, has been named to Data Economy's list of Americas 50: The world’s first top 50 North, Central and South American influencers. The list highlights "personalities who are leading data centres, cloud, edge computing and data through charting new innovations or technological breakthroughs, sheer investment or business acumen, or exceptional entrepreneurial skillsets."

Mike Nelson joins Xcalar as Chief Scientist

CS alumnus Mike Nelson (Ph.D. '88, advisor: John Ousterhout), has become Chief Scientist at Xcalar, a fast-growing big data processing and virtual data warehouse platform. While at Berkeley, Neslon was a key member of the team that developed the Sprite Distributed Operating System. He was a fellow and one of the first engineers at VMware, where he was the lead architect of VMkernel, an operating system designed to run virtual machines that is the foundation for all VMware server products. At Xcalar, he will be responsible for spearheading the company's Cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) efforts.

Teresa Meng appointed to Ambarella Board of Directors

EECS alumna Theresa H. Meng (M.S. '85/Ph.D. '88 advisor: David Messerschmitt) has been named to the Board of Directors for Ambarella, Inc., a leading developer of low-power, HD and Ultra HD video processing semiconductors. Meng is a Professor Emerita at Stanford University who took leave in 1998 to found Atheros Communications Inc., a developer of semiconductor system solutions for wireless network communications products, which was acquired by Qualcomm Incorporated in 2011.

Celebrating Women in STEM: Video Game Designer Carol Shaw

EECS alumna Carol Shaw (EE B.S. '77/CS M.S. '78), one of the first female industrial video grame designers, is the subject of a University of Missouri, Kansas City News article celebrating women in STEM. Shaw, who was always drawn to engineering and math, used punch cards and Fortran for her first programming class at Cal. She became one of the first professional female video game developers when she joined Atari after graduating 1978. in 1980, Shaw’s “Tic-Tac-Toe” became the first commercially released video game designed by a woman. She developed a scrolling format for her second game, "River Raid," while working at Activision. It won several awards, including Inforworld’s Best Action Game and Best Atari 8-bit Game of the Year, when it was released in 1982. Vintage Computing and Gaming magazine said that River Raid is "almost universally regarded as a masterpiece of game design."

Turnitin Acquires Gradescope

Turnitin, a leading provider of academic integrity and writing solutions, has acquired Gradescope, a class grading platform co-founded by CS Prof. Pieter Abbeel and alumni Arjun Singh (B.S. EECS '10/Ph.D. CS '16), Sergey Karayev (CS Ph.D. '15), and Ibrahim Awwal (EECS B.S. '12/M.S. '15). The platform reduces the time associated with grading in college courses via an optimized online workflow and clever application of artificial intelligence. Developed at Cal when the alumni were teaching assistants, Gradescope is now used in most CS, Math, and Chemistry classes at Berkeley, and has quickly been adopted at many top higher-ed institutions, including half of all Ivy League schools, as well as at over twenty-five leading R1 universities. “Bringing Gradescope into the Turnitin family allows us to realize our mission across more subjects, with more instructors and students than ever before. Gradescope represents Turnitin’s first formal foray into STEM education, an area of increasing importance, that must also be held to high standards of academic integrity," said Turnitin CEO Chris Caren.

Corelight wins 2018 Network Security Innovation Award

Corelight, a cybersecurity startup co-founded by CS Prof. Vern Paxson, has won the 2018 Network Security Innovation Award from CyberSecurity Breakthrough, an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global information security market. Corelight delivers "network visibility solutions for cybersecurity" by merging the power of an open source framework called Bro with a suite of enterprise features to create a line of sensors. These sensors make Bro dramatically easier to deploy in physical and virtual enterprise environments. The CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards recognize "the world's best information security companies, products and people."

The life and career of EECS Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy were celebrated with a commemorative bobblehead doll in her image at the 2018 Grace Hopper Conference (GHC) in Houston, Texas, last week. Bajcsy was recognized alongside Engineering and CS legends Grace Hopper, Annie Easley, and Mae Jemison by GHC sponsor Liberty Mutual Insurance. Bajcsy is renowned for her innovations in robotics and computer vision, specifically the development of improved robotic perception and the creation of better methods to analyze medical images. In addition to founding the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at UPenn, she headed the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate from 1999–2001, with authority over a $500 million budget.

Hanzhong (Ayden) Ye builds VR sharing platform

CS alumnus Hanzhong (Ayden) Ye (M.S. '12, advisor: Björn Hartmann) is profiled in an ejinsight article titled "Former Silicon Valley executives build VR version of YouTube." In 2016, Ye gave up his lucrative job with Sierra Ventures in Silicon Valley to establish VeeR VR, a Virtual Reality content sharing platform in China. The platform allows the growing number of content-creating VR enthusiasts to share their work with viewers via the web and mobile devices. In less than two years, the company has grown to 70 employees, while the number of its registered users around the globe has reached more than 20 million. Customers include corporate users such as travel companies, news agencies, restaurants, and hotels.

Blockchain’s Energy Web Foundation names Hervé Touati as first CEO

CS alumnus Hervé Touati (Ph.D. '90, advisor: Robert Brayton) has been named the first CEO of the Energy Web Foundation (EWF), a global nonprofit focused on "unleashing blockchain’s potential to accelerate the transition to a decentralized, democratized, decarbonized, and resilient energy system." EWF, the world's largest energy blockchain consortium (with a network of more than 70 affiliates), is building the shared, digital infrastructure—an open-source, scalable blockchain platform—specifically designed for the energy sector’s regulatory, operational, and market needs. Touati, who comes to the EWF from Shell, is an energy industry veteran with more than two decades of executive-level experience.

Joe Hellerstein on the must-haves of a modern data prep platform

CS Prof. Joseph Hellerstein is the subject of a feature in InsideBigData titled "The Must-Haves of a Modern Data Prep Platform." Hellerstein is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Trifacta, a company that develops data wrangling software for data exploration and self-service data preparation for analysis. he discusses how the challenge of data preparation sits squarely between the growth of BI and visualization tools and the specific data needed to fuel them. Efficient data preparation is key to alleviating new demand from business users. The article offers three key requirements that a data preparation platform should have. Hellerstein's career in research and industry has focused on data-centric systems and the way they drive computing. Fortune Magazine included him in their list of 50 smartest people in technology , and MIT’s Technology Review magazine included his work on th eir TR10 list of the 10 technologies “most likely to change our world.”